Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Is Non-reductionism about Identity Possible?

See my post 'Fission and Identity'.

2008-03-05T17:03:00.000-05:00

The seeming ad-hoc nature of the 'no branching cla...

2008-03-05T16:57:00.000-05:00

The seeming ad-hoc nature of the 'no branching clause' in various reductionist accounts of personal identity has always struck me as philosophically unsatisfying.

Why isn't it more reasonable (perhaps since our concepts of diachronic identity are on firmer ground than revisionist accounts like Parfit's), then, to interpret Parfit's fission-style arguments in favor of reductionism as instead a kind of reductio, where the absurdity of having two or more 'survivors' all satisfy the criterion is itself taken to show the inadequacy of reductionist criteria of identity over time?

Identity over time is a 'further fact', but it's not a mysterious further fact in the way that a Cartesian soul or a Lockean consciousness (understood as possibly immaterial) would be, it's a further fact simply because identity over time is primitive and so unanalyzable.

Sure. (At least, I'm not sure what it would mean t...

2008-03-04T23:04:00.000-05:00

Sure. (At least, I'm not sure what it would mean to take something as primitive and yet deny that it's a "further fact" beyond the various kinds of qualitative continuity.)

I take identity over time to be primitive. Does t...

2008-03-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

I take identity over time to be primitive. Does that make me a non-reductionist?

Ah, that would make more sense -- thanks!

2007-11-11T15:54:00.000-05:00

Ah, that would make more sense -- thanks!

I always thought that Parfit's argument was meant ...

2007-11-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

I always thought that Parfit's argument was meant to prove something specific about personal identity. One way personal identity would be reducible: basic objects are time slices. But then the identity of everything is reducible. So maybe Parfit is assuming some objects do endure, but trying to show something special about P.I. Even in a world with enduring objects, the self can't be one of those objects.

Maybe a good analogy is a philosopher claiming tha...

2007-11-11T06:10:00.000-05:00

Maybe a good analogy is a philosopher claiming that platonic realism about morality would make more sense if our world was Middle Earth.

I don't think that line of reasoning ultimately works, but it has some attractive qualities.

I can see that making sense from an ultra-Quinean ...

2007-11-11T04:07:00.000-05:00

I can see that making sense from an ultra-Quinean perspective, kind of.
Parfit can be construed as giving an account of the empirical conditions needed for a Cartesian conception of personhood to never run into any unsolvable dillemas in its application [as long as you don't do any conditional conceptual analysis, which is unwelcome from a Quinean perspective anyway].

When joined by a certain kind of anti-realism about philosophical truths this can make for contingent reductionism: Given that Cartesian personhood seems to be our default conception of personal identity, and given the remarkable correlation between emirical discoveries that make it inapplicable and the revealation of its a-priori incoherence, personal identity seems like a prime candidate for contingency from a Quinean point of view.

"This argument seems to be assuming that the basic...

2007-11-10T20:25:00.000-05:00

"This argument seems to be assuming that the basic objects are time-slices. If this is so, wouldn't our account of the identity of anything over time be reductionist?"

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. What puzzled me, then, is that Parfit seems to think that reductionism is merely contingently true, even though he doesn't give any reason to think that it's merely contingent that the basic objects are time-slices. He explains how there might have existed Cartesian egos, but why think that their manner of persistence through time would be any different in kind from your couch's (which, we reductionists assume, perdures rather than endures)?

Richard,This argument seems to be assuming that th...

2007-11-10T13:28:00.000-05:00

Richard,

This argument seems to be assuming that the basic objects are time-slices. If this is so, wouldn't our account of the identity of anything over time be reductionist?

I take it a non-reductionist about personal identity is already assuming that there are objects that endure over time. In this case, wouldn't the continuous existence of an ego over time be like the continuous exsitence of my couch over time? So long as a particular ego never loses any of its essential features, wouldn't that be enough for it to endure?

You seem to know this literature much better than I do, so I'm genuinely curious about the problem here.